It seems that I may have inadvertently loaded the password validation plugin in MySQL 5.7. This plugin seems to force all passwords to comply to certain rules.
I would l
To disable password checks in mariadb-10.1.24 (Fedora 24) I had to comment out a line in /etc/my.cnf.d/cracklib_password_check.cnf file:
;plugin-load-add=cracklib_password_check.so
then restart mariadb service:
systemctl restart mariadb.service